The Mechanic & the Muse: Accomplish/Begin-Continue to

Reporting

"Made in the Shade"
A package on Southern writers: profiles, interviews and an 11-state directory of writers you may never have heard of but are worth your time. Appeared in Creative Loafing chain.
"Mass Appeal"
A day-in-the-life profile of a telegenic parish priest in Miami. Published in Catholic Digest, reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times
"The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham"
How the first West Point graduate from South Vietnam disappears after the fall of Saigon, only to be rescued by his classmates two decades later. A cover story in The Washington Post Magazine

My to-do list has grown to Brobdingnagian proportions.

There are so many items undone that this morning I decided to try a new approach. Without consulting anything but the top of my head, I divided the things I needed/wantedto do in two groups:

1. accomplish things that are most important

2. begin/continue things that are important

Using this bifurcated method, I was able to resume working on the revision of my textbook (I can't finish it in one day, but I can continue work on it); went to lunch (accomplishing a necessary task.)

Back from lunch, I shifted exclusively to tasks that can be broken up in segments, like attacking my out of control email inbox, voice mail, web surfing. These brief, daily sessions then left me free to focus on something I wanted to accomplish without interruption, namely feeding my blog with an item about an approach to productivity. I'd count that as a two-fer.

The rest of my day includes some important tasks that have to be accomplished : visit my friend Julie in the hospital, dinner, exercise, read, family time. I can alternate these with tasks that I can begin or continue, like more email, voice mail, doing expenses, continue drafting a column, maybe even a little TV and web surfing.

There was a time when I replaced my to-do list with a done list, which for a while made me feel very productive. Ultimately, a lot of tasks were falling through the task, and I ditched the method.

And so begins another experiment in time management: dividing your life between what you must accomplish today and those tasks that you can begin or continue. The first draws a hard line; the second provides more freedom, and more important, less pressure, by acknowledging that not every tasks on your list can be finished in a day.